Rachel Houten’s journal round-up for 22nd April 2019

Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of some of the most recently published peer reviewed articles from the field. We don’t cover everything, or even what’s most important – just a few papers that have interested the author. Visit our Resources page for links to more journals or follow the HealthEconBot. If you’d like to write one of our weekly journal round-ups, get in touch.

National health services are constantly under pressure to provide access to new medicines as soon as marketing authorisation is granted. The NCPE in the Republic of Ireland has a rapid review process for selecting medicines that require a full health technology assessment (HTA), and the rest, approximately 45%, are able to be reimbursed without such an in-depth analysis.

Formal criteria do not exist. However, it has previously been suggested that the robustness of clinical evidence of at least equivalence; a drug that costs the same or less; an annual (or estimated) budget impact of less than €0.75 million to €1 million; and the ability of the current health systems to restrict usage are some of what is considered when making the decision.

The authors of this paper used the allocation over the past eight years to explore the factors that drive the decision to embark on a full HTA. They found, unsurprisingly, that first-in-class medicines are more likely to require an HTA as too are those with orphan status. Interestingly, the clinical area influenced the requirement for a full HTA, but the authors consider all of these factors to indicate that high-cost drugs are more likely to require a full assessment. Drug cost information is not publicly available and so the authors used the data available on the Scottish Medicine Consortium website as a surrogate for costs in Ireland. In doing so, they were able to establish a relationship between the cost per person for each drug and the likelihood of the drug having a full HTA, further supporting the idea that more expensive drugs are more likely to require HTA. On the face of it, this seems eminently sensible. However, my concern is that, in a system that is designed to deliberately measure cost per unit of health care (usually QALYs), there is the potential for lower-cost but ineffective drugs to become commonplace while more expensive medicines are subject to more rigor.

The paper provides some insight into what drives a decision to undertake a full HTA in Ireland. The NICE fast-track appraisal system operates as an opt-in system where manufacturers can ask to follow this shorter appraisal route if their drug is likely to produce an ICER of £10,000 or less. As my day job is for an Evidence Review Group (opinions my own), how things are done elsewhere – unsurprisingly – captured my attention. The desire to speed up the HTA process is obvious but the most appropriate mechanisms in which to do so are far from it. Whether or not the same decision is ultimately made is what concerns me.

This paper suggests that ‘joint working arrangements’ – a government-supported initiative between pharmaceutical companies and the NHS – are not being implemented according to guidelines on transparency. These arrangements are designed to promote collaborative research between the NHS and industry and help advance NHS provision of services.

The authors used freedom of information requests to obtain details on how many trusts were involved in joint working arrangements in 2016 and 2017. The declarations of payments made by drug companies are disclosed but the corresponding information from trusts is less readily accessible, and in some cases access to any details was prevented. Theoretically, the joint working arrangements are supposed to be void of any commercial influence on what is prescribed, but my thoughts are echoed in this paper when it asks “what’s in it for the private sector?” The sheer fact that some NHS trusts were unwilling to provide the BMJ with the information requested due to ‘commercial interest’ rings huge alarm bells.

I’m not completely cynical of these arrangements in principle, though, and the paper cites a couple of projects that involved building new facilities for age-related macular generation, which likely offer benefits to patients, and possibly much faster than could have been achieved with NHS funding alone. Some of the arrangements intend to push the implementation of national guidance, which, as a small cog in the guidance generation machine, I unashamedly (and predictably) think is a good thing.

Does it matter to us? As economists, it means that any work based on national practice and costs is likely to be unrepresentative of what actually happens. This, however, has always been the case to some extent, with variations in local service provision and the negotiation power of trusts with large volumes of patients. A national register of the arrangements would have the potential to feed into economic analysis, even if just as a statement of awareness.

Can the NHS survive without getting into bed with industry? Probably not. I think the paper does a good job of presenting the arguments on all sides and pushing for increasing availability of what is happening.

I’m really interested in how this area is developing. Multi-morbidity is the norm, especially as we age. Single condition models are criticised for their lack of representation of patients in the real world. Appropriately estimating the quality of life of people with several chronic conditions, when only individual condition data are available, is incredibly difficult.

In this paper, parametric and non-parametric methods were tested on a dataset from a large primary care patient survey in the UK. The multiplicative approach was the best performing for two conditions. When more than two conditions were considered, the linear index (which incorporates additive, multiplicative, and minimum models with the use of linear regression and parameter weights derived from the underlying data) achieved the best results.

Including long-term mental health within the co-morbidities for which utility was estimated produced biased estimates. The authors discuss some possible explanations for this, including the fact that the anxiety and depression question in the EQ-5D is the only one which directly maps to an individual condition, and that mental health may have a causal effect on physical health. This is a fascinating finding, which has left me somewhat scratching my head as to how this oddity could be addressed and if separate methods of estimation will need to be used for any population with multi-morbidity including mental health conditions.

It did make me wonder if more precise EQ-5D data could be helpful to uncover the true interrelationships between joint health conditions and quality of life. The EQ-5D asks patients to think about their health state ‘today’. Although the primary care dataset used includes 16 chronic health conditions, it doesn’t, as far as I know, contain any information on the symptoms apparent on the day of quality of life assessment, which could be flaring or absent at any given time. This is a common problem with the EQ-5D and I don’t think a readily available data source of this type exists, so it’s a thought on ideals. Unsurprisingly, the more joint health conditions to be considered, the larger the error in terms of estimation from individual conditions. This may be due to the increasing likelihood of overlap in the symptoms experienced across conditions and thus a violation of the assumption that quality of life for an individual condition is independent of any other condition.

Whether the methodology remains robust for populations outside of the UK or for other measures of utility would need to be tested, and the authors are keen to highlight the need for caution before running away and using the methods verbatim. The paper does present a nice summary of the evidence to date in this area, what the authors did, and what it adds to the topic, so worth a read.